Category: spirituality

Campolo: Why the Christian Right will Dominate

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As an evangelical Christian with a progressive social agenda, Tony Campolo has occupied and defended an uncomfortable patch of territory in the American religious world.

I’m not sure how much of the horror story Tony relates in this article is autobiographical, but we can be sure the Eastern University sociologist and American Baptist preacher knows whereof he speaks.  This frank discussion of a painful subject was written for Christian Ethics Today, a publication sponsored by moderate evangelicals seeking to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with their God.

Have you ever wondered why there are so few progressive religious voices in the popular media?  Dr. Campolo tells us exactly why that is, leaving little to the imagination.  As we seek to forge a new moral consensus for ending mass incarceration, we need to know what we’re up against.  Alan Bean

Why The Religious Right Will Dominate

By Tony Campolo

Eastern University

There are reasons why Religious Right Evangelicals will continue to dominate religious discourse, not only in their own sector of the Christian community, but also in what transpires in mainline denominations. Moderate voices, for the most part, are being sidelined and those with liberal views will find fewer and fewer means to express their opinions or gain an audience for their convictions. (more…)

McLaren: Is God Violent?

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This succinct article summarizes a chapter in Brian McLaren’s excellent book, A New Kind of Christianity.  This piece was originally published in Sojourners and has also appeared in Christian Ethics Today.  How should Christians think and feel about the criminal justice system, in general, and the death penalty, in particular?  Everything hinges on the nature of God.  Alan Bean

Is God Violent?

By Brian McLaren

I recently received a note from a pastor and missionary we’ll call Pete. It went like this: ”I have read most of what you have written, including A New Kind of Christianity…I would say I am in agreement with [much of what you write], but I do think you bring disservice to this argument in the evangelical world when you shun the ‘violence’ of God and the subsequent need for the cross’ justification, which was also quite violent.” (more…)

Jesus, Ayn Rand and the art of the impossible

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Maybe Jesus didn't really mean it

By Alan Bean

My wife Nancy and I are teaching a confirmation class at our Methodist church in Arlington, Texas.  While we are stuffing our students’ heads with information about the Bible, God, Jesus, the Church and Christian discipleship, we thought we should also let the Bible speak on its own terms.  We decided to work through an entire book of the Bible in the course of nine months and settled on the Gospel of Mark; it’s the shortest and most succinct of the Gospels. 

Mark is also the most brutal document in the Christian New Testament, in the sense of assaulting modern sensibilities.  It isn’t just that Jesus performs miracles of healing every time he turns around (we moderns could attribute that to the power of suggestion); it’s the bits about money and power that sting the most. (more…)

Isaiah 58:1-12: a word to the righteous

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"Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?

 A new moral consensus for ending mass incarceration must flow from narratives of faith.  Isaiah 58 is a natural starting place. 

The setting for this prophecy is the hard years following the return from Babylonian captivity, approximately 500 BCE.   The people who made the trek back to Jerusalem quickly became disillusioned.  The walls of holy city were still broken down.  Solomon’s glorious temple lay in ruins.  Work began on a new temple, a modest structure a fraction the size of the building it replaced, but progress was slow.

The people had expected more.  Much more.  They couldn’t understand why God was letting them down.  Their commitment to Torah had strengthened considerably during the hard years of exile.  Worship attendance, sabbath keeping and tithing were all way up. 

Still the people struggled.  They couldn’t understand why such bad things were happening to such good people. 

Isaiah’s response speaks for itself. (more…)

When the Devil plays God

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Byron De La Beckwith the younger

By Alan Bean

“The devil will sometimes play the part of God and let things happen.”  Byron De La Beckwith Jr.

The Jackson Clarion Ledger has published two articles stemming from an interview with Byron De La Beckwith Jr.  Byron II claims his father didn’t kill civil rights leader Medgar Evers in June of 1963. 

He said those behind Evers’ assassination belonged to the Citizens’ Council, which produced television shows in which “experts” declared that African-Americans were genetically inferior. He would not share the names of the men involved. He said they later joined the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, believed to be responsible for at least 10 killings in the 1960s.

 Jerry Mitchell reports that the FBI will be looking into De La Beckwith’s assertions, but I doubt new facts will emerge.  De La Beckwith, like his daddy, enjoys the limelight and intends to make the most of it.

More interesting, from my perspective, is Byron the Second’s description of his personal contribution to 1960s anti-civil rights terrorism and his sad reflections on the current status of the Mississippi Ku Klux Klan.  (more…)

Faith and Mass Incarceration: An Annotated Bibliography

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By Dr. Charles Kiker

I thought it would be helpful to list some works I have read which I feel would be helpful in understanding the topic and in working to end the New Jim Crow.

1. First would have to be the recent work by Michelle Alexander,

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Ms. Alexander argues convincingly that the criminal justice system at all levels, including the Supreme Court, especially in regard to the war on drugs, has effectively instituted a new Jim Crow by incarcerating young African Americans and those of Hispanic origin vastly disproportionate to their numbers. (more…)

Faith and Mass Incarceration

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By Dr. Charles Kiker

Faith played a major role in the Civil Rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s, and the concomitant dismantling of the old Jim Crow. To be sure, not all people of faith, maybe not even a majority and certainly not a majority in the South, held the Civil Rights movement in high regard. I remember hearing one active Baptist layman say shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King, “He was a dadblamed communist, and somebody should have killed him a long time ago.”

But the faith and the liberation songs inspired by the Exodus from Egypt helped to sustain the civil rights movement through fire hoses, police dogs, beatings, and murders. And the civil rights movement insured the demise of Jim Crow I. The progress of the mid-twentieth century civil rights movement created an officially color blind society. (more…)

The Advent Spirit in a Detroit Courtroom

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This reflection originally appeared in the Huffington Post

The Advent Spirit in a Detroit Courtroom

By Mark Osler

Twelve years ago, it was a particularly bad day in Detroit. A storm came through as the temperature hovered just below freezing, and the precipitation switched between freezing rain and snow, making any outdoor movement treacherous.

At the time, I was a federal prosecutor. Ours was a tight office, and when something interesting happened in the courts, we all found out about it almost instantaneously. We were fascinated by the judges we appeared before, so any rumors about them were especially flammable.

On the day of that storm, a particularly intriguing story blasted through our offices. As I heard it, one of the magistrate judges had presided over a detention hearing, in which he considered whether a defendant should be held in jail or released prior to trial. The magistrate heard evidence and argument, and finally ruled against us: He held that the defendant should be released on bond. The man likely was not a big-time criminal, but a drug addict involved in low-level crime to support his habit.

That was not the end of the story, though. (more…)

Where real Christians are Republicans and real Republicans are Christians

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Joe Straus

We’re talking Texas, of course.

As the old saying goes, “When three different people tell you you’re drunk, it’s time to sit down.” 

Or, When Fox News suggests you’re a bigot, it’s time for some honest reflection.

It helps, of course, that Joe Straus, the embattled Speaker of the Texas House, is a Jewish Republican as opposed to being a black Democrat.  But the principle applies.

“Over the past month,” the article notes, “in a spate of e-mails and political pitches, conservative opponents of incumbent Speaker Joe Straus have said they want him replaced not because of his Jewish religion, but because of his betrayal of Republican principles.”

But in a November 30th email, John Cook of the Texas Republican Executive Committee reminded his readers that, “We elected a house with Christian, conservative values. We now want a true Christian, conservative running it.”

If you read enough of these statements, you will notice that the words “Republican,” “conservative,” and “Christian” are used more or less interchangeably.  In Texas it is generally assumed that orthodox Christianity teaches conservative economic and social principles.  It thus follows, as the night the day, that real conservatives are Christians who vote Republican. (more…)